Any conversation regarding IT will inevitably shift towards network monitoring and management.
In essence, one of the most universally recognized responsibilities of an IT department or provider is to ensure the continuous operation of a business’s critical systems. As your business grows, its network grows not only in size and complexity but also in significance and value.
At its fundamental and strategic core, your network infrastructure revolves around collaboration, communication, and commerce— the essential elements that sustain and foster business growth. This is where your business applications live, where crucial customer, product, and business information is stored.
Given the invaluable nature of this resource, securing its availability is paramount. However, this is a challenging task due to various threats like hackers, denial of service attacks, viruses, and information theft, all of which can result in downtime, data loss, and a decline in overall credibility and profitability. Not to mention, the network landscape is undergoing significant transformations with the introduction of new technologies, devices, and strategies, such as virtualization and service-oriented architectures. For this reason, network management holds immense significance, serving as a fundamental capability for your business, no matter its size. If your business relies on your network in any way, shape, or form, its management is no longer an option.
What is Network Management?
Network management involves a broad functional spectrum that includes device monitoring, application management, security, ongoing maintenance, service levels, troubleshooting, planning, and other tasks.
The coordination and oversight of these functions should ideally be handled by an experienced and reliable network administrator. But, the effectiveness of any network administrator, no matter how knowledgeable and capable, depends on the visibility of network information they can manage and respond to. So, they must stay informed about their networks at all times, including real-time and historical data on the usage, performance, and status of every device, application, and data within the network.
What is Network Monitoring?
Network monitoring systems provide insight into devices and connections, allowing IT professionals to detect and report failures, plan remediation, and maintain compliance and security standards.
There are several important components at play, including:
- Network device monitoring: This is when network devices fail, or you’re dealing with downtime, loss of productivity, or even security risks. Hardware issues and errors can bring the entire infrastructure to a halt, while high CPU or network bandwidth usage can slow operations to a painful grind. Employing a network monitoring system allows for the prompt identification and resolution of potential issues. Moreover, numerous network monitoring solutions offer additional value by automatically integrating new devices, mapping network topology, and detecting signs of malicious activity or potential breaches.
- Alerting systems: When issues are identified by the network monitoring system, alerts are automatically flagged and routed to the IT staff to be evaluated. Once the issue is verified as a credible fault or threat, your technicians can get to work on remediation.
- Reporting: Most network monitoring platforms can generate reports on findings over time.
Why Do You Need a Network Monitoring Strategy?
Your business network needs to be able to support high-value operations that not only store your private data but provide communication channels and maintain every aspect of the organization. Therefore, your IT team must maintain high network service levels, tight security, and constant visibility into their infrastructure. Due in no small part to widespread digital transformation, the modern enterprise network has become increasingly challenging for IT departments to manage – and it might only get more strenuous.
A proper network management strategy will equip your IT department with the tools and methodologies necessary for the care and optimization of enterprise networks without excessive manual intervention or high labor costs. Via integrated wired and wireless management capabilities, you can fully manage complex networks, from end to end.
A modern remote management strategy should guide you through the following network management best practices:
- Clear visibility into the network: Your team should get a clear picture of all the connected devices in the network, observe the flow of data, and quickly pinpoint and mitigate issues that drag down network performance and potentially lead to outages.
- Efficient use of IT resources: Perhaps most importantly from an IT standpoint, the tools in a network monitoring solution decrease the level of manual work needed. This reduces labor costs and frees up technicians for more critical project work or other tasks.
- Scaling and future infrastructure needs: Network monitoring systems show how network components have performed over a period of time, giving insight into the future. These reports can be analyzed to help anticipate when your organization may need to consider upgrading or implementing new IT infrastructure.
- Greater protection against security threats: Network monitoring establishes a baseline of performance on a network. This makes it easier to spot unusual changes in network behavior, such as unexplained increases in network traffic levels. When IT can identify potential cybersecurity issues quickly, they can often intervene before the threat becomes costly.
Challenges of Network Monitoring
The challenges for network monitoring are twofold: capturing and storing large amounts of data, all while analyzing the distinct types of data that is being transported.
Here are a few challenges that networking teams come across in their day-to-day activities:
- End-to-End Visibility: Enterprises face a challenge in achieving end-to-end visibility as they operate various daily applications like Microsoft Office 365 and video conferencing tools. The potential failure of any of these applications can significantly impact day-to-day business operations, affecting crucial functions such as marketing, sales, and customer support. How can networking teams access clear insights into every connected device to address and rectify failures before they have a cascading impact on other devices?
- Network Performance Reports: Traditional network monitoring tools are outdated in today’s distributed network ecosystem, lacking the ability to provide granular visibility to massive volumes of network performance data. Legacy solutions focus only on basic metrics and network path health, offering no help for today’s distributed and cloud-driven network ecosystem. Network teams need visibility into key data for a successful monitoring strategy, and performance insights presented in a dashboard help identify network issues promptly.
- Avoiding Failures and Downtimes: Preventing network outages, failures, and downtime is a top responsibility for network engineers or administrators. Monitoring key metrics such as bandwidth utilization, traffic, latency, and CPU utilization is a must. The challenge arises in setting up real-time alerts and notifications during network issues so that your team can identify and address the root cause, troubleshoot, and recommend necessary upgrades. Legacy monitoring solutions fail to provide timely alerts, putting the enterprise at risk of significant financial losses.
- Access to Remote Site Insights: Relying on legacy solutions makes it difficult for network teams to act, analyze, and solve issues in today’s distributed remote network ecosystem. It is essential to adopt monitoring capabilities for quick problem resolution in remote locations, averting connectivity losses, and ensuring peak network performance, directly influencing the productivity and ROI of branch, site, and mobile workforce operations.
PROACTIVE NETWORK MONITORING WITH YARDSTICK TECHNOLOGIES
Reliably and predictably connecting applications to employees and customers is the cornerstone of your business and Yardstick understands this.
Users want quick, uninterrupted access to applications that work well and meet all their needs, wherever they are, on whatever device they happen to be using. Applications need to load quickly and perform without a hitch – otherwise, users and customers will look elsewhere. Our team will help with your navigation of application acceleration products and functionality ensuring your content is delivered with reliability, security and resiliency.
Yardstick’s proactive monitoring solution provides a comprehensive approach to IT management, addressing challenges related to real-time alerts, network performance reports, failure prevention, and remote site insights. With our services, businesses can mitigate the risks associated with unreliable and insecure IT infrastructure, ensuring continuous operations, productivity, and the protection of sensitive data. Contact us today for a free consultation.
